Category / Blog
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In Remembrance of My Dear Friend Silke Helfrich, a tribute from David Bollier
[This was originally published on http://www.bollier.org/. You can read the original post here.] It’s hard to recall exactly when my friendship and countless collaborations with Silke Helfrich began. In a strict sense, they began at the first-ever activists’ conference on the commons – one that she organized in Mexico City in 2006 as head of…
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Farewell Commoning Fellow – A Tribute to Silke Helfrich from the Cape Town office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation
A tribute from the Cape Town office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation to Silke Helfrich, a former colleague, an author, a pioneer, an intellectual and someone whom we called a friend. “As much of human history confirms, people are able to accomplish a great deal with each other in self-determined, self-organized, needs-oriented ways, without commercial…
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Silke Helfrich: Free Fair and Alive
That was Silke Helfrich’s life, and that is what it will remain. Now we are grieving her, our staff member of many years, our colleague, our friend. We are all shaken that Silke was fatally injured while hiking in the Liechtenstein Alps on 10 November. She would no longer return to give her lecture planned…
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Commoning is a vigorous force for renewal and hope
[This is the latest version of the introduction to Free, Fair and Alive. Since the English version of the book was published before the covid crisis, the writers decided to create a new, updated intro addressing the consequences and responses to this global pandemic and the role of commoning in creating resilience in the face…
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‘Libres, dignos, vivos’: The Spanish Edition of ‘Free, Fair & Alive’ Is Published
Silke and I are excited about deepening the conversation about the commons in Spain and Latin America with a Spanish translation of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons – Libres, dignos, vivos: el poder subversivo de los comunes. The book will be published this week in Spain by Editorial Icaria; in…
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Ontology as a Hidden Driver of Politics
One of the big epiphanies that I had in writing Free, Fair and Alive with Silke Helfrich, was that a lot of political disagreements are not just about law, politics, or economics. They reflect fundamental clashes of worldviews. They are disputes about how human beings should or can relate to each other and to nature, and what…
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Silke Helfrich: “Technologies can be an important part of a commons”
Interview conducted by Genoveva López and originally published in the P2P Models Blog. Silke Helfrich is a writer author and commons defender. She was the Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation from 1996 to 1998. She travels throughout Europe meeting with leading theorists of the commons and frontline activists. She is co-founder of the Commons-Institut in…
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Lessons from the Pandemic: Three Notable Essays
One of the most difficult things to endure in this pandemic, apart from the biophysical threat of Covid-19 itself, is the evaporation of meaning. Familiar institutions and norms are being revealed as dysfunctional or anti-social, leaving us in a fog of disorientation. Can the old, familiar narratives about “free markets” and a (seemingly) benign state…
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How the coronavirus is forcing us to think beyond market and state
The Corona crisis demonstrated in fast motion the dilemma into which market-state-thinking leads. This is where commons come into play, i.e. what people do and are able to do with each other in a self-determined, self-organised, needs-oriented manner and without any marketing interest. If this article were a sonata, its minor key would show us…